I have taught both architectural design and history-theory at the Yale School of Architecture for the past twenty-five years. While such “double-duty” has become somewhat rare in the increasingly specialized academic environment, I am convinced that the range helps me facilitate the interplay between verbal and visual knowledge, between thinking and doing that I believe lies at the heart of architectural education. Overcoming the artificial fault line between history-theory and design teaching is my main pedagogical goal.

My scholarly interests cover 20th Century European and American art and architecture, art and aesthetic theory, and history of ideas. I have authored several prize-winning books in the area: Achtung Architektur! Image and Phantasm in Contemporary Austrian Architecture (MIT Press/Graham Foundation, 1996), Alvar Aalto: Architecture, Modernity and Geopolitics (Yale University Press, 2009), which won the Alice Davis Hitchcock Prize given annually by SAH for the best piece of scholarship in the field by North American writer; and Kevin Roche: Architecture as Environment (Yale University Press, 2011). I am also co-editor with Donald Albrecht of Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future (Yale University Press, 2006), which won the Philip Johnson Award, given also by SAH annually for the best exhibition catalogue and the Bannister Fletcher Award, given by the London Authors Club annually for the best book in art or architecture. My most recent book Exhibit A: Exhibitions that Transformed Architecture, 1948-2000 was published by Phaidon in 2018. My forthcoming book Untimely Moderns: How Modern Architecture Discovered Future in the Past, which posits disregard for chronological time as a hallmark of 20th century architecture, will be published in spring 2023. I am currently completing a book manuscript Le Carré Bleu: Legendary Little Magazine of Modern Art, Architecture, and Urbanism, based on the aforementioned exhibition, for Getty.

In addition, I have published scholarly essays, book chapters, and articles in various anthologies and journals including AA Files, Daidalos, Finnish Architectural Review, Getty Research Magazine, Log, Perspecta, PIN-UP, and SOM Journal, as well as exhibition catalogs. My curatorial experience includes working in various capacities in exhibitions Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future, Kevin Roche: Architecture as Environment, Alvar Aalto: Second Nature, and Le Carré Bleu: A legendary little magazine from Helsinki, 1958-1961. My scholarly and curatorial work has been supported by Getty, the Graham Foundation, the Finnish Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Austrian Ministry of Science and Research.